Art Show

One of the founding members of the South Jersey Artists Coalition is holding a show with talk and performance on December 4th at 1:00 p.m. featuring her portraits and Dr. Daisy Century. The show will be at the Dr. Ross Beitzel Gallery of Rowan College of South Jersey on 1400 Tanyard Rd., Sewell, NJ 08080.

Loren Dann is finished her graduate degree this Decenber. Her paintings are beautiful and I recommend you visit this show and see these portraits. Loren has been instrumental in many kinds of art programs and is working on bringing her ideas to the Underwood Building at Woodbury Friends Meeting if her grant application is approved this Spring.

Hpe to see you at the show. Loren will also appear at Artist Talk, January 29, 2025 at 12:00 p.m.

Jo Ann

What is Christmas without a train show?

I just received this in my e-mail and I wanted to share it with you because I LOVE this museum! It is a small private museum of fascinating groups of family heirlooms and the collections of the owner. I have been many times and will be sure to visit again this Christmas! Hope you will too

Hi Everyone!

It's time again for the Annual Toy Train Show at the Museum of American History at Deptford, NJ! Starting November 29th, 2024 and running thru January 28th, 2025, the Show will be feature O and O-27 gauge toy trains, from the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s. Lionel, Marx and American Flyer engines, with cars attached, will race on two different platforms, each one decorated with vintage buildings, and other structures to give a traditional holiday appearance!

The Museum is open Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 3pm.

I am attaching a flyer for you. Please feel free to share!

Hope to see you soon at the Museum!

Jeffrey Norcross

The Museum of American History at Deptford, NJ

138 Andaloro Way

Deptford, NJ 08093

856-812-1121

Christmas Memories

Last night I was drowning my sorrows in a few hours of Hallmark sugary romance. In the final film of the evening, set in Paris, the male romantic lead in an attempt to get to know the female romantic lead asks her for her favorite Christmas memory.

At first, I was kind of stumped. Rather than a whole memory, or a ujit of narrative, I had a stream of brief impressions. The first that came was of Walnut Street and 6th Street in Philadelphia, 1964. I am in my dark green mohair coat, brown calf high cowboy style boots and I am freezing cold, walking up to Market Street to catch the bus home after work at W. B. Saunders Publishing Company on Washington Square. On that corner was a beautiful florist's shop and the window was filled with Christmas wreths, poinsettia, red ribbons and frosted around the squre corners from the cold. I was 18 yeqrs old and happy and Philadelphia then was beautiful. The people were all well dressed, especially at the holidays, the stores were all decorated magnificently - not modern and austere - but with an abundance, a kind of Victorian mixed with Post World War II exuberance. The big stores like Gimbels and Lit Brothers and Snellenburgs all had multilayered vilaes with trains and animatronic figures, Dickens style villages, Alpine landscapes with Swiss villages and snow, cosy luxurious fantasy American living rooms with fireplace, tree, snowy windows and well turned out families in matching Christmas Pajamas and robes. Christmas Wonderland was the overall theme. There were actually men selling roasted chestnuts on Market Street and they were delicious rich and hot and warming. People were happy, shopping, carrying red shiny store bags, wearing mufflers and hats and gloves.

That memory was quickly replaced by the Nuremburg Christmas Market in Germany at around the same period, a couple of years later. I was still the same optimistic, enthusiastic young woman, living in an illusion. I was married and we had an apartment in a courtyard in a small town called Heilbronn. We had a beautiful little tree decorated with real candles. My mother-in-law was visiting us. My husband drove us to the enormous Nuremburg Christmas Market. It was twilight and all the stalls were lit and steaming with the breath of the marketers and the hot drinks and hot treats they had to offer. They were piled high with beautifully carved little wooden figures, village houses, wooden trees, angels, reindeer, knitted hats and mittens and scarves, handcarved wooden Black Forest clocks, religious statuary, woven things, metal things, glass things, pottery things, everything! I remember my mother-in-law and my husband eating pickled herring. The signts the lights the sounds, the smells, all that rich and ancientm traditional swirl of Christmas celebration and my happy Christmas youth.

I also remember the one night madness bustle of my father and my god-father Neal Schmidt, building the Christmas platform in the emptied living room of our brick row house on Warnock Street i Philadelphia while my mother oooked for Christmas and made them food for the evening in the kitchen. Then the tree went up then the trains and the villages and the lakes of mirrors, the snow of cotton fluff and snow paper, the lights and decorations on the tree, all of it watched by two small children from surreptitious top of the stairs to the second floor bedrooms where we were supposed to be asleep. We were in our pajamas but we couldn't sleep with all that noise and excitement. Dad and Mom and Neal were all so young and happy and beautiful then. They would have been in their thirties, and Neal and Dad were home safely from the navy and World War II and Mom was in the midst of her dream of domesticity and a home of her own and family. It was all that one night. I still have a doll given to me by my god-father, Uncle Neal, the sweetest, kindness, gentlest man I ever knew.

If I spend time, more memories rise from the attic of my memory, surprisingly few from more recent years and most from my childhood. I think I can retrieve some from my daughter's childhood and from West Virginia family times, but now I am tired of it. Maybe later.

Happy trails (through the past as well as the woods, the day and the life) Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Sad Day for America and the World

Jay Gould = "I can hire half the working class to kill the other half." I remember reading this in a civics class as a child and it stuck with me. That is what happened here. The OligarchsThe man who would be TYRANT has wo used their money and power to propagandize half the working class to defeat the other half. I am not surprised, just disappointed and sad. The wave of toxic machismo and arrogance and rage that has been sweeping the country was bound to be a tidal wave that swept this trash into office again.

I noticed in the news items this morning that the press is blaming Democrats for all the alleged flaws in strategy, taking no blame whatsoever for the failure of the press to work harder to expose Trump's lies and crimes. I wrote in often to compain how the press continued to call him President when he had lost the election and by so doing, they bolstered those who claimed he never lost.

There is no way to underestimate the toxic macno appeal Trump has for so many men who would like to disempower women in every way possble - deny birth control, for starters. They want to bring America back to the 60's when women were denied a fair educational opportunity and were forced to work in service jobs that paid so little we couldn't support our children if we left abusive and exploitive domestic situations.

Add to that the racism that still runs deep and strong in this country and Kamala really had no chance but we have to keep trying. As the old expression goes, "Get knocked down 8 times but get up 9."

OI am going to take Uma for her walk now and get my mind off this sad morning news. I will try not to let fear and anxiety get the better of me. Half of all Americans have elected a criminal and a sociopath for our leader. Sigh.....

I have said it before, I feel like a good German in 1939 - appalled, frightened, trapped and yet hopeful that somehow this poison will be contained.

It's gym day and the dog walk and the gum routine will help me stay strong for the frightening future ahead of us. Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

ps: Fisk and Gould tried to corner the gold market and brought about the stock crash of Black Friday 1868? They were Robber Barons and now we have one in the presidency. When Murdock bought Fox, he used it to build the prooaganda machine that duped the dopes who elected Trump to fleece them, or bleed them dry would be even more like it. I am not a conspiracy theorist usually but this looks like a corporate take over to me.

It is said that 40 percent of the people of the world won't have access to potable water by 2025. Water is the new oil. The corporate take-over will be of water, oil, gas, precious minerals like rare earth needed for computers. Trump will take away all the safe guards of our lands and resources and open them to exploitation.

Election Day 2024

I am so happy to be able to vote. Each year, I go in person to our local voting place, MEPRI Hall on Kings Highway in Mt. Ephraim. I recognise most of the poll workers and thank them for their help. Every year I have watched one or more documentaries or movies about the monumental struggle of the Suffragists who fought for our right to vote for a hundred years. My great hero of the struggle is Alice Paul She devoted her life to the struggle and she suffered but persevered. Her grace, strength, integrity and courage are an inspiration to me. Each year women who have voted go to her grave and put their "I voted" stickers on her grave stone. It brings tears to my eyes, this gesture honoring her sacrifice and devotion. Many Quaker women hav devoted their lives to various humanitarian causes including Abolition (my personal favorite is Abigail Godwin of Salem).

Each year, I also visit the grave of Peter J. Maguire (not a Quaker) who fought for workers rights. I don't know if wherever they are, they are aware of this but it tells others who also care that they are not alone in honoring our noble, devoted, self-sacrificing heroes.

This is a good place to honor two other local heroes, Benjamin Lay and John Woolman for their work in both Abolition and in vegetarianism.

Happy Voting Day fellow Americans! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com